The world is facing a food crisis and systems are needed to address its root causes, guest speakers said at the 4th World Shiology Forum in Haikou, Hainan province.
More than 1,000 delegates from 43 countries attended the food forum's opening ceremony.
Shiology is a public knowledge system aimed at addressing human "eat plus food" issues.
Tom Dietmar Heilandt, former secretary of the Codex Alimentarius Commission, said in a keynote speech that Shiology sets out to observe the objective reality of humans and food, between humans and food maternity systems and between food and the world order. It seeks to find the rules behind it.
Shiology is a new discipline established from scratch. The term "Shiology" in English was created by a Chinese man, Liu Guangwei, founder and director-general of the World Shiology Forum, in February 2019. Wu Hongbo, former under-secretary-general of the United Nations, said he was deeply impressed by Liu's original ideas.
"He looked at 'eat plus food' issues from a global perspective, integrating them with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and contributing to their global implementation," Wu said.
Liu, in his own speech, later shared the objective principles of Shiology.
"Food has the function of satisfying hunger and curing disease," he said. "In daily life, to distinguish the function of food, people call food that has the function of curing diseases oral drugs, but they ignore the essential attribute of food over time."
Eating well is a matter of the quality and variety of food available, he added. To be healthy by eating is a matter of eating method, because the method can either cause diseases or cure them.
Liu said respecting individual differences is the essence of eating matter, and meeting the different needs of the stomach, intestine and body is the content of eating matter.
Antonio Guterres, secretary-general of the United Nations, sent a message to the forum saying that the world must urgently transform its food systems to make them more sustainable, equitable and resilient, and science and technology must be leveraged to improve access to healthy foods while using less water and reducing the human carbon footprint.
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